The male muse: What of the men behind successful women? Are they invisible too?

The Invisible Woman exposes the girlish naivety of the female muse as a
sham. But, Francesca Steele asks, what of the invisible men? Is there
such a thing as the male muse?

Felicity Jones plays Charles Dickens' muse in The Invisible Woman

By Francesca Steele

8:00AM GMT 10 Feb 2014

They say behind every great man there is a great woman. InThe Invisible Woman,a film out this weekend directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens, that great woman is not his long-suffering wife Catherine (who, by the way, bore him 10 children only to find herself unceremoniously cast off) but his long-time mistress and muse, the young Nelly Ternan. Nelly, played here by Felicity Jones, is everything such a man might want: young, beautiful, pure and baggage-free. Her job here is not to entertain but to prop up the great Dickens, and her own lack of talent (Nelly is a failing actress) drives the point home further. The message to 18-year-old Nelly when 45-year-old Dickens’s seduction begins is clear: hush, sit pretty and take this old man’s money.

The view taken by The Invisible Woman, which is based on the book by Claire Tomalin and penned by Abi Morgan, a British screenwriter with an established interest in feminist issues (her next film Suffragette looks at the early days of the women’s right movement), is an interesting one because it exposes the girlish naivety of the muse as a sham. Nelly is submissive not because she has no backbone but because this is the 19th century, she cannot find work or a husband and she has nowhere else to go. Sure, she likes Dickens well enough, but she yields because, well, needs must.

Abi Morgan

But it’s not just for Dickens that she plays the role of obedient innocent. It is for us too. Muses have long been an attractive prospect for film-makers precisely because they are unsullied and invisible. Not only does this mean have they historically been hidden away – ideal for a story-teller looking to shed new light on a familiar personality – but Hollywood and audiences are simply more comfortable with the idea that a chaste and mysterious woman is more inspiring than an opinionated, highly visible one. We expect them to be this way because films have presented them to us in this way so many times before.

Consider, if you will some of the other most memorable on-screen muses: The Girl with The Pearl Earring, in which Scarlett Johansson plays Vermeer’s quietly sensual house-maid, for instance, or Shakespeare in Love, for which Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for her portrayal of the love interest that inspires the Bard to pen Romeo and Juliet. In both cases it is the ladies’ modest beauty and their fascination with the work of the men in question (convenient for a busy artist and of course, an aphrodisiacal ego boost) that is key to their intrigue – and to our interest in them. It doesn’t hurt either that both are banished before they can repel their menfolk with any kind of real personality, their unblemished feminity still in tact.

It’s a generalisation, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that the majority of on screen muses are similarly acquiescent. And when muses try to be more than a blank canvas often they suffer for it. Even the acclaimed sculptor Camille Claudel, portrayed by the brilliant Juliette Binoche in last year’s Cannes-nominated Camille Claudel 1915, has more luck when she is playing muse to her long-time lover Auguste Rodin than when she tries to forge her own path. When she finds herself holed up in a madhouse there is a strong suggestion that she is being punished for not knowing her place.

What then, of the men behind successful women? Are they invisible too? Are they compliant, accommodating, happy just to fit in and make the life of their loved ones that little bit easier at the risk of their own happiness? Well, if Hollywood is anything to go by, then no, they are not.

The male muse

Male muses, if we can call them that, are on the whole a more varied bunch than their female counterparts. The men behind great female writers, leaders and painters are bulllish, dashing and proactive, leaders as well as lovers, on screen at any rate.

In the 1997 drama Mrs Brown, Billy Connolly’s John Brown, the servant who woos Queen Victoria out of her despression over the death of her husband, is a mischievous entertainer, not a silent supporter.

Jane Austen’s suitor Thomas Lefroy, played by James McAvoy in Becoming Jane, is positively obnoxious when the two first meet, a quality Jane relishes, and in Frida, the biopic starring Salma Hayek as the mono-browed Mexican painter, the world-weary philandering of her tempestuous husband Diego Riviera (Alfred Molina) is positively glorified.

Male muses can do what they like, it seems, where female ones must be well-behaved. And of course, they are not really male muses at all, because while they may provide emotional support as friends and lovers, they are not objects that silently inspire. Nor are they kowtowed in admiration at the feet of their inamorata, in the same way that we require our female muses to be. Germaine Greer once wrote that “the muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist… the yin to his yang.” By extension then, the male muse, must be the masculine part of the female artist, the yang to her yin, the strength, indeed, to her frailty. It’s not a very attractive picture, is it, in the modern age?

It’s not really Hollywood’s fault. It is easy and indeed, even accurate, for film-makers to grasp at gender stereotypes because history backs them up. This type of moral and creative inequality genuinely did have a huge impact on relationship dynamics, artistic or otherwise. Men could get jobs, so they didn’t need to be objectified. And, as The Invisible Woman shows, it paid to be accommodating.

“Young and sweet and innocent and beautiful. The epitome of this girl I fantasise of,” designer Marc Jacobs said not so long ago of his long-time fashion muse, Sofia Coppola. Talk about patronising, for an Oscar-nominated film director. Isn’t it time for the muse to be more, both on screen and off? I’d like to see more films about the men behind great women - or indeed just about more extraordinary women in general. Abi Morgan is already well ahead of the curve having also written the screenplay for 2012 film The Iron Lady, a peek into the personal life of Margaret Thatcher, in which her husband Denis is, if not exactly a muse, incredibly, quietly supportive, always standing just behind her.

But when no one is forced to stand behind anyone, that will be a real leap forward. Both for Hollywood and for us.

Francesca Steele is a freelance journalist who writes about film, and is a former business reporter. She can be found tweeting @francescasteele